petard

Posted on June 6, 2020 | 2 comments

In the news recently was an item about a young man who was planning to bomb some cheerleaders – apparently because he resented the fact that they didn’t want to have sex with him – but in the process of making the bomb he blew his hand off. Hoist with his own petard!

It’s a popular phrase, “hoist with [his/her/their/your/my] own petard.” I’m a little more partial to “went hunting and shot [his/her/their/your/my] dog,” though that doesn’t mean quite exactly the same thing. But many people also prefer a slightly different version: “hoist on [his/her/their/your/my] own petard.” The with version has always been the more popular – currently about five times as popular, if Google Ngrams are any index – but the on has a certain appeal.

I mean, hoisting, right? It lifts a person up? Like a hook?

Say, what is a petard, anyway? It’s like a halberd or something, isn’t it? So you would be hoisted in the air on your own long stafflike pointy weapon thingy?

That is not what a petard is. And the scope of implications of hoist has changed over the centuries since Shakespeare first wrote the line.

Oh, yes, the phrase “hoist with his own petard” – which is really the only way petard is even used anymore – is from Hamlet, act 3, scene 4: “For ’tis the sport to have the engineer Hoist with his own petard.” He’s talking about his plan to have Rosencrantz and Guildenstern deliver a letter that, unbeknownst to them, orders their own execution – in place of the letter they think they are delivering, ordering Hamlet’s execution. Hamlet continues from that line: “and ’t shall go hard But I will delve one yard below their mines, And blow them at the moon.” He promises to deliver both injury and insult – sort of like the Frenchman in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the one who says “I fart in your general direction” and then catapults a cow at the Englishmen. Except these schoolfriends of Hamlet will be having their own cow and farting in their own general direction.

Do you know the French word pet, by the way? It’s the source of petard, which, because it’s from French, is pronounced with a short e and the stress on the second syllable (but these days we do say the d at the end). Pet doesn’t have to do with dogs, but it does have to do with something dogs often do: fart. A petard is a small explosive device that goes off with a loud bang; the ‘farter’ name is a bit of soldier humour. Petards were typically limpet mines and were used for such things as blowing gates and doors open. Of course if you’re going to attach one to a door, you have to put a short fuse on it or there’s a good chance the people on the other side of the door will knock it off before it blows.

So when Bill Spearshaker wrote his line, he meant ‘blown into the air by his own short-fused explosive’. And while these days hoist implies lifting with some solid device (hook, knotted rope, platform), at Shakespeare’s time it could also imply lifting by explosive force.

Which, incidentally, it doesn’t seem the incel in the news story was – all of his body except his hand stayed at floor level, though that one hand was definitely displaced (I’ll spare you further details). But he sure did to himself what he was hoping to do to others. I don’t think he will be repeating that, either.

Addendum:

I recently ran into a story about the origin of this phrase that I hadn’t heard before, which surprised me, given my familiarity with the subject – usually one runs into these amusing accounts from time to time, but I don’t know the original source of this one. The story is that “hoisted by my own petard” (the person I saw telling this story made the usual mistake with the quote) comes from “a very old theater trope in which a character intends to throw a bomb (petard) at someone but accidentally blows himself up, being hoisted in the air by a rope to the amusement of the audience.”

Now, the “with” versus “by” goof is no problem; it works either way. But we know, first of all, that Shakespeare is the common point of reference for the line. Now, the person relating the story pointed out it was possible that Shakespeare was quoting a common expression of the time, and in theory it is (though we will see in a moment why in practice it’s not so likely), but if you want to declare that he got it from somewhere else you actually have to give some evidence that he did, or at least that it existed before he said it. That’s how this all works; otherwise I could just say everything was actually made by elves and it would be unanswerable.

In any event, since the Shakespeare citation is unimpeachable, if Shakespeare got it from another source, Shakespeare’s reference to it should be consistent with the supposed source – and, of course, the source has to be no newer than Hamlet. So let’s look at that.

First, I will allow that hoist could already at Shakespeare’s time be used with ropes; the difference between now and then is just that now it can’t be used with being blown in the air. But those ropes…

Here’s the thing: English theatre in Shakespeare’s time was not performed in theatres as we’re used to them. They didn’t have fly lofts or rigging or anything of that sort. Many of them, including Shakespeare’s famous Globe, were open to the air – completely open; nothing to hang ropes from. The plays of the Elizabethan theatre were made to be performed wherever one could set them up: “two planks and a passion,” as the saying goes. Minimal scenery, and certainly nothing that would have to be raised or lowered from above. Stagecraft on the Continent at the time was overall not much more involved (there are some famous Italian Renaissance examples of indoor proscenium theatres, but even those were not equipped for this kind of stunt), and most of Shakespeare’s audience would not have gotten references to Continental theatre anyway. (How do I know all this stuff? Funny the things one learns in the course of getting a PhD in theatre. But do feel free to verify it.)

And then there’s the matter of what Shakespeare wrote: “For ’tis the sport to have the engineer Hoist with his own petard; and ’t shall go hard But I will delve one yard below their mines And blow them at the moon.”

So… engineer. Which is a bit inconsistent with the story, but let’s pretend the villain was an engineer (in the Elizabethan sense: no trains at the time!). But what’s this bit about delving one yard below their mines? How in the heck does that work with the story?

Well, it doesn’t. And there’s also the matter of a petard not being a thrown bomb. As I mention above, it was generally a limpet mine with a short fuse; its use was to blow open gates and other fortifications (an effort that was vulnerable to being undermined as Shakespeare describes). A hand-thrown bomb was then, as it is now, a grenade (also called a grenado or granade at the time). Grenades were in use (somewhat limited, but at least a bit) in warfare at Shakespeare’s time, though he doesn’t mention grenades even once in his plays.

I will say, too, that I can’t think of a play from the Elizabethan era (let alone earlier) where a villain attempts to throw a grenade, but there could be one, I suppose – I haven’t read them all, and not all of them have survived. But a plot device of a bomb-wielding villain being blown in the air by his own device seems much more modern to me, just going on my own education; if you have contradictory evidence, I’ll be genuinely interested to see it.

My guess is that whoever made up that story saw a play from the nineteenth or early twentieth century that had something like that in it and decided that that was where the phrase came from. That is, in my experience, a pretty common way for people to make up folk etymologies. But folk etymologies are the fairy tales of historical linguistics. They’re bad history (and bad theatre history in particular in this case), often bad sociology and bad psychology, and always bad linguistics. And they’re not a great thing to stake one’s intellectual credibility on. Research is easy these days; I recommend it.

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One of those questions that are often asked

Posted on June 3, 2020 | 4 comments

A friend passed on to me one of those grammar questions that are often asked and often opined on:

In a sentence like “She is one of those people who are always late,” I learned to cross out prepositional phrases when linking subject to verb, so I would cross-out “of those people” and link “she” with “is” instead of “are.” Isn’t “of those people” modifying “one” (which acts as a complement to “she”) and not acting as the actual subject?

The problem with just crossing out preposition phrases is that you sometimes miss where the phrase ends – or doesn’t end! There are a few ways to look at it. The bracket way is short but benefits from further explanation:

She is one [of those people {who are always late}].

What that means is that there are people who are always late, and she is one of them. Yes, “of those people” is modifying “one,” but “who are always late” is modifying “of those people.”

A person could object (as many do) that it could equally be

She is one [of those people] [who is always late].

In other words, of those people, she is one who is always late. The problem with that is only in part that “She is one who is always late” is a bit odd; after all, “She is one” is a bit odd by itself too, but we’re not saying it by itself. The issue is really with “of those people.” For one thing, if the “always late” isn’t there to describe the set of “those people” of which she’s a member, it’s not specified who “those people” are. Who are they? And why are we mentioning them at all? Let’s look at a similar structure:

She is an eater of those hot dogs that have fallen on the floor.

She is an eater of those hot dogs that has fallen on the floor.

The difference is plain enough: in the first, the hot dogs have fallen; in the second, she has. And we have to assume that which hot dogs “those hot dogs” are has been established or can be inferred contextually; if not, it may be perplexing.

She eats those hot dogs. She has fallen on the floor.

Umm… tell me which hot dogs.

Returning to the example in question, the “is” version means this:

She is one of those people. Specifically, she is one who is always late.

If you’re in a context where you know who “those people” are, OK; but otherwise you have to specify them, or why are you mentioning them? And if your answer to “Who are they?” is “People who are always late,” you have shown why you really want to say “those people who are always late.” If she is one of them, then yes, she is one who is always late (as are they all), but if you go with the “is” version then you haven’t actually specified who they are; in fact, you’ve implied they’re not all like her in this respect. It’s like saying

It’s one of those hot dogs that is delicious.

You can see that the implication is that not all of those hot dogs are delicious; otherwise, why would you be singling that one out? Or if you say

He’s an editor who is popular at parties.

you know that it implies that not all editors are! And likewise, if she is one of those people who is always late, by implication others of those people are not. On the other hand, if you say “one of those people who are” and she is one of them, then she is covered.

That’s the logical analysis, and it’s the one I go with as an editor. In casual speech, I admit that I sometimes say “who is” in similar instances before I can catch myself, just because the structure of the sentence is so analogous to others where “is” would be appropriate; “one of those people” is a noun phrase like “a member of the club,” and we would most likely say “She is a member of the club who is always late.” (Unless it’s a club of people who are always late. Which is, in fact, what we mean in this case!) But when I’m editing, it’s more important to make it stand up to analysis. And it sounds good to me.

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chirocracy

Posted on June 2, 2020 | Leave a comment

Today, another poem, a triolet. The word that inspires it, chirocracy, is from Greek χείρ kheir (cheir) ‘hand’ and κρατία kratia ‘power rule’; the chir is the same as in chiropractor, with a “hard” ch and an i like “eye,” but the stress is on the o as in democracy. It literally means ‘rule by hand’, but it doesn’t mean just any hand; it means strong-handed rule, rule by force. The sole citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from a 1677 History of the Government of Venice, and it uses an older style of spelling: “It might rather have been called Chirocratie, all things being managed by Violence and Tumult.”

chirocracy
The strong hand breaks all that resists.
Force, might, and will soon overcome.

Your sticks and eggs and bricks and fists
the strong hand breaks. All that resists
is one smooth stone, which still persists
serenely as the grip grows numb.

The strong hand breaks. All that resists
force might—and will soon—overcome.

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utricide

Posted on May 29, 2020 | 2 comments

Imagine! Imagine you have a dream in which you are beset by Schrödinger’s cat, or multiple cats of Schrödinger, and you draw your sword and slay one or the other or both, or maybe all three. Or… when you check to see the damage… actually it wasn’t cats. Um, wineskins, perhaps?

Well, many of us have been laid low on occasion by the contents of a wineskin (or liquids that could have been contained in a wineskin but instead went into our stomachs, very similar in shape). I suppose a few have experienced stabbing pains in consequence. And sour dreams are made of these…

The thing about dreams is that nothing bears up under inspection; if you try to read some text, it changes as you go, and if you try to see what you have drawn your sword on, well… unlike Schrödinger’s quantum states, which are resolved on inspection, the details of dreams have the impression of resolution only until you inspect them, at which point they become indeterminate.

I’m sorry, were you saying something? What? Oh, huh. Well, here’s the thing. Utricide is a real word, though not often used. Ever. Maybe twice, as far as we (and Oxford) know. What does it mean? We can see the -cide and we know that it can refer to the act of killing (as in homicide) or to the killer (as in parricide), though the latter is not so current. But utri-?

A quick check tells us that it’s from Latin uter, which another quick check tells us means ‘either’ or ‘both’. Um, so you kill either one, or both? Wait, which do you kill? Well, Latin for ‘which’ can also be uter.

Ugh, this is utter madness! Wait, it’s OK: there’s another Latin uter, from a different source, and it means ‘wineskin’, as in utriform.

But who the heck would kill a wineskin?

Let’s turn to William Adlington’s translation of The Golden Ass by Apuleius:

Then you
beinge well tippled, & deceaved by the obscuritie of the
night, drewe out your swoorde couragiously, like furious
Aiax, and killed, (not as he did the whole hearde of
beastes) but three blowen skinnes, to the intent that I
after the slaughter of so many enemies without effusion
of bloud, might embrace and kisse not an homicide but
an Utricide: thus when I was pleasantly mocked and
taunted by Fotis, I said unto her: Verely, now may I
for this atchieved enterprise be numbred, as Hercules
who by his valiaunt prowesse perfourmed the twelve
notable labours, as Gerion with three bodies, and as
Cerberus with three heades. For I have slaine three
blowen geate skinnes . . .

Yes, an utricide is a murderer of wine skins.

But given that the slaughter arises from a confusion of the distinction between fantasy (or dream) and reality, and its result is a collapse of the duality into a decided single reality, we might well also say that an utricide is someone who murders either/or. Someone who ends duality and reveals the underlying unity of reality.

Well, you go off and ponder that. I have a bottle to kill.

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gerbera

Posted on May 26, 2020 | Leave a comment

Isn’t this a pretty flower?

No it’s not. It’s dozens of pretty flowers. Hundreds, even.

This is a gerbera, also known as a gerbera daisy. It’s a popular, versatile flower: colourful like a party, a floral night of carousing (and I suppose if you’re trying to make up for a night of carousing, a few gerberas will do). When you look at the lovely top of a gerbera, you are looking at a capitulum, a saucer-shaped head that has three rings of small flowers (florets): an outer ring of ray florets, a middle ring of trans florets, and an inner ring of disk florets. The ones that have the petals that fall on your floor after a few days are the ray florets. They’re sort of like the eyelashes, if the trans florets are the iris and the disk florets are the pupil.

The different florets are all in origin basically the same thing, just developed differently because of where they are. Take a closer look:

The gerbera is also the Gerbera with a capital G, taxonomically, and the capital is fitting because it’s named after Traugott Gerber.

And what does this flowering plant have to do with its namesake? As Gerber might have said, gar nichts. Absolutely nothing. Well, OK, one thing.

Traugott Gerber was a medical doctor and herbologist. He was born in 1710 in Zodel, which is now in Germany, near Görlitz on the Polish border; he received his doctorate at Leipzig in 1735; for seven years after that he was a medical doctor in Russia and travelled around studying Russian plants; in 1743 he died in Vyborg, north of St. Petersburg, near the Finnish border, at the age of 33, and I don’t know what of. It was his love of botany and his friendship with Carl Linnaeus that likely inspired Linnaeus’s friend and patron, Jan Frederik Gronovius, to name a flowering plant after him. Gronovius first wrote of the Gerbera in 1737, and Linnaeus added it to his taxonomy the year after.

The Gerbera is native to tropical regions of Africa, Asia, and South America, and certainly not to Germany, Russia, or other nearby parts of Europe. Gerber liked and studied plants. The naming seems to be just out of honour and friendship, sort of like the Suzanniwana. (Apparently no one thought of asking the people from the native turf of the flower what they called it.)

But how about the name? Is it otherwise apposite? Well, Traugott Gerber (whose first name means ‘trust God’) was the son of a minister (who died a few months before Traugott was born), but Gerber is German for ‘tanner’, from gerben, ‘tan’. Now, tanning can make leathers prettier, perhaps, but really, it’s one heck of a stretch to connect it to flowers. The source of gerben is Proto-Germanic *garwijaną, ‘prepare’; it has descended to verbs meaning ‘do’ in Icelandic (gera), Norwegian (gjøre), Danish (gøre), and Swedish (göra) (in all of which the g is said like English “y,” I feel impelled to tell you). It has also descended to Modern High German gar, which literally means ‘cooked, done’ but is also used to mean ‘at all’ as in “gar kein Geld” (‘no money at all’) and “gar nichts” (‘nothing at all’) and a similar sense in “gar aus” (‘all out’, ‘all done’, the source of carouse). And it has descended to Modern English yare, a word seldom used now but meaning ‘ready, alert’ or (more often now) ‘eager, nimble, versatile’.

So. Just as the flowers on the capitulum of a Gerbera are essentially the same thing developed differently, yare, gar, göra, and Gerbera (and a few other words in other languages) have all developed differently in different places from the same origin. And if you’re looking for a fit between name and flower, it’ll have to do.

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empleomania

Posted on May 24, 2020 | 1 comment

What is it that draws people to public office? To become president, or governor, or senator, or mayor, or school board trustee?

I suppose there are many things. Some people feel a strong sense of responsibility and want to make things work as best they can. Some people love power and want as much as they can get. Some people just love the attention.

I am occasionally reminded of this little bit from Kurt Vonnegut’s 1973 novel Breakfast of Champions:

Trout couldn’t tell one politician from another one. They were all formlessly enthusiastic chimpanzees to him. He wrote a story one time about an optimistic chimpanzee who became President of the United States. He called it “Hail to the Chief.”

The chimpanzee wore a little blue blazer with brass buttons, and with the seal of the President of the United States sewed to the breast pocket. . . .

Everywhere he went, bands would play “Hail to the Chief.” The chimpanzee loved it. He would bounce up and down.

Now, there are definitely politicians whose motivations and performance are better than that. But there are also definitely politicians who really just love the adulation, the pomp and ceremony, the crowds, the cameras and microphones, the bands… Today’s word is for these latter ones.

Empleomania is a weird-looking word, I’ll grant you that. You can see that it comes from Greek (via Latin) because it ends with -mania, as in pyromania, nymphomania, Beatlemania, and so on. But that empleo is unexpected.

Which is because it didn’t come directly from Latin. It went through French and Spanish first. Latin implicare became Old French empleiier, which has come to Modern French as employer but was also taken into Spanish to be emplear, ‘use’, ‘hire’; empleo means ‘job’, but the Spanish word empleomanía focuses on a specific kind of job: political office or the civil service. And, borrowed into English as empleomania, it has meant specifically ‘overweening desire to hold public office’.

In other words, a mania for being mayor, or premier, or governor, or prime minister, or president, or MP, MLA, MPP, MNA, you name it…

And, I mean, OK, if there’s a job you really want to do, if you do it well, who’s to complain? If you say it’s a good job and you encourage people to do it well, at least that’s something. What I especially don’t like are empleomaniacs who spend their time talking about how bad the government is and how politicians shouldn’t be trusted. Or who rail at other politicians for living on taxpayer money when that is exactly what they are doing and have always wanted to do. Or, of course, those who do their jobs viciously and to the great harm of many of those they are elected to serve.

Beyond that, empleomania isn’t intrinsically bad. At least it helps guarantee a supply of people for jobs that government requires and that many people would really very much rather not do. It’s just up to the voters to choose the ones who can do the job well.

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To be, or not to be, that is the question

Posted on May 21, 2020 | 4 comments

Why stop at word tastings? That’s like filling your cupboards with food but never cooking it. Here’s a sentence tasting, which is really using a sentence as an excuse to explorations. It’s a long read.

The year is anno domini 1600, or perhaps 1601. We are across the river from London, in the middle of watching a play. Richard Burbage, a short, stout, utterly entrancing thirty-two-year-old actor, walks onto the stage of the Globe Theatre. The ground and galleries of the open wooden O are full of people, but Burbage takes the front of a broad, nearly empty rectangle jutting into it and claims the heart of a zero, a full nothing – or, depending on how you look at it, a Q.

There are three other people on stage, though Burbage seems not to see them: in the alcove in the back are two actors, playing a king and his adviser, present as an absence, and over to one side, kneeling as if praying, is a boy dressed as a young woman to play the paramour of the prince Burbage portrays. The two hidden men, according to the plot of the play, are using the young woman in hopes of drawing out the protagonist’s secrets. They expect professions of love, confessions of plans, the revelation of what is rolling around in the locked box of his head. They are about to be disappointed. Nobody – characters or audience – will get what they see or see what they get.

Burbage, who is holding perhaps a book, perhaps a weapon, perhaps nothing, but definitely not a skull (not in this scene), starts speaking towards the audience, who in the world of the play are not there but are in fact the entire reason this is even happening. He says words written by his friend and business partner, the successful 36-year-old actor and playwright William Shakespeare. His first line will become one of the most famous lines in the English language: Continue reading →

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Aina

Posted on May 18, 2020 | 7 comments

Nearly half my life ago, not long after I arrived in Toronto, I volunteered to usher at a dance festival. At the opening night party, I did my best to pretend to be extraverted; I chatted with a few people. I saw one young woman across the room who was sitting quietly, by herself, like a silent mermaid on a rock. She was, you might say, scenic. I lacked the nerve to go up to her and talk to her.

But on my first shift, two days later, I was assigned to work with her. I discovered she was not just beautiful but remarkably talented – a professional figure skater with a degree in dance, poetry in motion to behold; at the time she was on summer break from the touring spectacle Holiday on Ice. And we had similar taste in music. And she was very sweet.

The next day I signed up for extra shifts to work with her.

She was the one for me. And she still is, and (may it be so) always will be: a bit less than three and a half years later we were married.

She had – has – an unusual and beautiful name: Aina Arro. It is, of course, subject to incessant misspelling by all and sundry. Her last name, Arro, came from Estonia, like her father. Her first name, Aina, came from Latvia, like her mother. It is said like German eine, ‘one’, as in “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” (“A Little Serenade,” or more literally “A Little Night Music”). As I might say in German, Aina ist die eine (Aina is the one).

Aina has, at times, been a popular name for women in Latvia. In Latvian, the word means ‘view’ (as in “mountain view”) or ‘sight’ (as in “see the sights”) or ‘spectacle’ or ‘scenery’. But it’s only been used as a name since about 1915.

It’s only been used as a name in Latvian since 1915, I should say. It’s actually been used in Estonian and Finnish for a bit longer. The word aina means ‘always’ in both languages, but that’s not really where the name comes from; it’s originally an alternate form of Aino, which is the usual form of the name in both languages.

Aino is a fairly popular name in Estonia and Finland for women (and girls). Like quite a few timeless elements of Finnish culture, it traces to the pen of Elias Lönnrot. When he assembled (and edited, and confected) the folk songs of Finland into the Kalevala, he included one in which a young singer (Joukahainen) gets into a contest with an old master singer (Väinämöinen), loses, and is on the verge of drowning in a swamp, and to get Väinämöinen to save him he promises the hand in marriage of his only sister:

Kun pyörrät pyhät sanasi, luovuttelet luottehesi,
annan aino siskoseni, lainoan emoni lapsen

(drawing on Keith Bosley’s translation:
If you whirl your holy words around and call off your spell,
I’ll give my only sister, I will yield my mother’s child)

Well, that was how it was in the first edition, of 1835. In the second, of 1849, Lönnrot capitalized aino and made it her name:

annan Aino siskoseni

(I’ll give Aino, my sister)

And that is where the name Aino came from. The popularity of the Kalevala and the desire for a strong Finnish cultural identity ensured immortality for the name; among its most famous bearers was the wife of Jean Sibelius, the great Finnish composer. It also became popular in Estonian, which is closely related to Finnish.

The character Aino achieved immortality another way: through mortality. She didn’t want to throw away her golden youth and be tied down in marriage to this crusty old singer, no matter how talented he was. So she drowned herself and became a water spirit.

Sitte sinne saatuansa asetaiksen istumahan
kirjavaiselle kivelle, paistavalle paaterelle:
kilahti kivi vetehen, paasi pohjahan pakeni,
neitonen kiven keralla, Aino paaen palleassa

(Keith Bosley’s translation:
Then, when she got there, she sits herself down
upon the bright rock, on the glittering boulder:
the rock plopped in the water, the boulder sank down,
the maid with the rock, Aino beside the boulder.)

But where did this word aino come from? It seems an entertaining coincidence (I know, right?) that it means ‘only’ and sounds almost like German eine, ‘one’.

In fact, aino is a poetic shortening of ainoa, which is the usual Finnish word for ‘only’. And while Finnish is a Finno-Ugaric language, unrelated to Indo-European languages such as German, Swedish, and English, it has borrowed some words and changed them as it has seen fit. One such was the Proto-Germanic *ainagaz, ‘only, unique’, which in turn came from *ainaz, ‘one’, which is the source of… yes… eine. And one, too.

Do you follow all that? The Proto-Germanic word for ‘one’ (and the ancestor of one and German eine), tentatively reconstructed as ainaz, was modified to (reconstructed) ainagaz, meaning ‘only’, which was then borrowed into Finnish and (over time) became ainoa, ‘only’, which was trimmed for the motion of poetry to aino, and that was turned into a name Aino, which became popular in Finnish and Estonian and was then modified to Aina (coincidentally the word for ‘always’), and that was borrowed into Latvian (where the word also means ‘a sight to behold’).

And from that, the one for me, now and always, happened to be named Aina, who is a sight to behold, poetry in motion. And I get to see her every day, and listen to a little music with her every night.

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varlet

Posted on May 15, 2020 | 3 comments

“What? Who knocks at my door? Begone, varlet! Wouldst thou break the quarantine?”

“M’lord, ’tis I…”

“Who, varlet? Answer!”

“The valet.”

“The valet? …Oh. Enter.”

We know what a varlet is: a knave, a rogue, a scoundrel, a low sort, a villain – one whose crimes show violet on the sketch of life. And we know what a valet is (though we disagree on how to say valet): a serving-man, valid, of good avail. They are both of lower status, of course, but one knows his place and fills it suitably, and the other is a rogue.

Well, it’s not that simple, is it.

Is it?

If you’re from North America and say valet as though it were French, then the resemblance with varlet isn’t as strong, but if you’re from England or another country where the English-style pronunciation is used, then it’s quite similar, especially if you don’t actually say the “r.” But the tone of varlet is quite different from that of valet… these days.

We use varlet as we do because, since before Shakespeare was born, it has meant (to quote the OED) “A person of a low, mean, or knavish disposition; a knave, rogue, rascal.” But it got that meaning because it was, first, a word for a servant – a common person attending on a knight or other person of rank. In other words, a valet.

Is varlet an English reconstrual of valet? Or vice versa?

Not at all.

In fact, we got them both from French. It’s in French that the two forms pulled apart. In French, varlet is a now-archaic term for a servant of a knight; it was an alternate form of valet. Both were anglicized in pronunciation after being taken into English, but valet has gotten the high-class French-style reversion (like garage and homage) in some versions of English, and it never suffered the degradation its r-ful version got.

Does it seem unfair to call serving-people and commoners villains? Well, villain was originally by definition a local rustic servant of the villa, or, in the feudal system, a peasant entirely subject to the lord of the manor. They weren’t the property-owning job creators, just unskilled ungrateful local slaves! (Oh, slave has a heck of a history, by the way, and yes, it’s related to Slavic; the connection is Western European conquest and subjugation of the Slavonic countries.)

But how did we come to think of valets and villa-servants as knaves? Oh, say, do you know what a knave is? Originally, a knave was a varlet, a valet, a serving-boy to a knight. If you speak German you’ll know the word for ‘boy’ is Knabe. Yes, it’s the same word, just split apart by the yawning centuries. A knight had his boy, and when he was angry at someone he might compare that person to a serving-boy. “Boy! Why do you speak to me like that, boy?!” (Or, to quote Shakespeare, from Coriolanus, “Measureless liar, thou hast made my heart Too great for what contains it. Boy! O slave!”)

So apparently people of the lower classes are all supposed to be rogues? Well, the ones who don’t know their places, anyway.

Are you guessing where this is leading? OK, I’m not being quite fair. The origin of rogue is still a matter of speculation and dispute. But evidence suggests that, in its origins meaning ‘haughty, aggressive’ and its likely link to arrogant, it meant someone of the lower sort who was… uppity. Didn’t know his place.

But at least rogue is gaining a certain charm lately. Like rascal. Which was once a purely opprobrious term, referring to a… well, a low-class person. The rabble. Rascal apparently comes from a French verb meaning ‘scrape’, as in the bottom of the barrel. Because people who shine our shoes and work in our fields and factories and pour our coffees just aren’t worthy of the respect accorded to those of us who sit in offices and move money around, right?

So, once again, our language bears the still-bleeding scars of centuries of classism and status-based contempt. Varlet, villain, knave, rogue, rascal: someone who is “not our sort, dear,” someone who is a low hick, someone who doesn’t know their place. They probably split their infinitives and dangle their participles too.

But of course we still need them to clean our suits and mop our floors. Diffidently.

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scabbald

Posted on May 13, 2020 | 2 comments

I am a faint scabbald set within a formicated frail.

Or at least that feels right to me. It’s actually the third definition of Franken’s anti-Atlantic, according to Dictionarish.

Dictionarish, @dictionarish, is “Dictionary entries, as dreamt by a neural network | bot by @mewo2”; in other words, it’s what you can get if you set artificial intelligence to trying to imitate a dictionary. You might say it’s a computer’s answer to prisencolinensinainciusol. Obviously as soon as I saw it I followed it.

The three definitions of Franken’s anti-Atlantic, tweeted on May 8, 2020, are “1 relating to the lower class. 2 a medieval conflict, especially by assistance; last of: she was able to resign about drugs 3 a faint scabbald set within a formicated frail.” I shall leave the first two aside; number 1 is too clear, and number 2 is its own story. But number 3 touched something within me. Something that loves vaguely unsettling things that I can’t entirely understand.

Most of the words in it are no problem. Everyone knows what faint and frail mean; although frail is normally an adjective, it appears to be a noun here, and I think our parsing engines are robust enough to sort it out. Formicated is an excellent and underused word; literally it means ‘ant-infested’ or ‘moved like an ant’, but by transference it also means ‘having [or having had] a sensation like crawling ants’ – in other words, what we call “pins and needles” but what in Spanish (as I learned from Salvador Dali and Luís Buñuel thanks to Un chien andalou) is sometimes called “las hormigas,” literally ‘the ants’, and you can see hormiga descended from Latin formica, which means ‘ant’, not ‘artificial countertop’ (weirdly unrelated etymologically) – although I have certainly gotten the ants from jamming the tender spot of my elbow against a Formica counter edge. I have also gotten formicated from sitting tapping on my computer too long, as I am doing right now.

OK, fine, after so long in lockdown my meatshell is surely a formicated frail. But what is a scabbald?

Scabbald certainly looks familiar, doesn’t it? It obviously resembles scabbard and perhaps ribald and the family name Sibbald (which makes a cameo in Calgary place names; Sibbald’s rorqual is also an alternate name for the blue whale). And yet it’s not in the Oxford English Dictionary, and it’s not in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, and it’s not on Wiktionary. It’s not even on Urban Dictionary (you’d think some 14-year-old might have imagined something disgusting to say it means, but not yet). And if you Google it, you think you’ve gotten hits, but they’re all one of three things: a mis-scanned scabbard, the words scab and bald next to each other, or, now, the phrase “A faint scabbald set within a formicated frail,” which since May 8 has, for a lark, been my display name on Twitter and consequently has been polluting the search results (the Dictionarish definition is in an image and so doesn’t show up as text).

So scabbald is a word that seems familiar but is actually utterly inscrutable because entirely meaningless. You could make guesses as to its sense, but they would just be on the basis of other words it looks like (which is, yes, how we most often work out the meanings of words new to us, which sometimes leads to words shifting in sense towards more common words they resemble). It came up by accident and just seems real enough to be acceptable.

In other words, a scabbald is the hood ornament on a classiomatic.

And also, it seems, a word for the dim light glimmering from the back room of my mind: a faint scabbald set within a formicated frail.

So mote it be.

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