BULL
A large animal, a papal decree, a ludicrous statement. Three wide-ranging definitions for one of the most mythic words. The bull is there at the beginning of time, a robust beast with which our ancestors deeply identified, longing as they did for the virility of the animal, and its horned association with the phases of the moon. Going back to the source, we find the PIE root bhel-, to blow, to swell, like a snorting bull, pawing at the ground in a bullring. It enters Old English as bula and the diminutive bullock. This is evident by the rituals of bull-riding, bull-dancing, bull sacrifices, and bull coins, all of which were rife in the ancient world. During the 13th century edicts issued by the Vatican were sealed with bullets of wax, from the Latin bulla, seal; hence, a papal bull, and later, bulletin, little edict. The third meaning enters like the proverbial bull in the china shop, probably from the Middle English noun bul for “falsehood,” and the 15th-century verb bull, to mock or cheat, and Old French bouller, to deceive. Companion words include bullshit, the smelly epithet; bulldoze, bulldozer, bull’s-eye. Roy Blount Jr. cites the American Heritage Dictionary’s tracing of bull back to” the PIE root bhel, to blow, swell with derivates—referring to various round objects and to the notion of tumescent masculinity: boulevard, balloon, ballot, and fool.” Speaking of the devil, Will Rogers once quipped: “After eating an entire bull, a mountain lion felt so good he started roaring. He kept it up until a hunter came along and shot him. The moral: When you’re full of bull, keep your mouth shut.” And I still recall my father’s advice when I went into the offices of the Wayne Dispatch to interview for my first newspaper job: “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, buddy, baffle them with bull.“
BUMMER
In recent slang, a lousy deal; originally an idle, worthless fellow, a rascal. Older than you think, the root word bum was first recorded in 1387, possibly imitative, as the OED says, of a “protuberance, swelling.” Five centuries later, we find bum, as in hobo, tramp, in 1864, from bummer, loafer, idle person, 1855, possibly deriving from British slang for “butt, backside, bum,” and also German slang bummler, loafer, from bummeln, go slowly, waste time. Thus, a picture emerges of the hordes of German immigrants in the Northern army during the Civil War, using the word to describe how the war was going slowly, wasting their lives away. Bummer, for a terrible experience, like the fraternity running out of beer in Animal House, arises in the 1960s. But even so there is startling evidence of 19th-century usage that might have been muttered by John Belushi: “Thus San Francisco has been called the Elysian of bummers.” In California, men who profess to be journalists, and so obtain free dinners and drinks, are called “literary bummers.” Companion words or phrases include bum’s rush, for forcible eviction, like being tossed out of a bar or ballgame. To wit, the great crepehanger of a comic George Carlin said, “If God dropped acid, would he see people? Bummer.” The Hindu shopkeeper Apu says to Ned Flanders on The Simpsons: “That’s the problem with your religion: it’s a bummer—but the sing-alongs are okay.” And the Dude in The Big Lebowski sighs “Bummer” no fewer than a dozen times, which is far less than the 283 “f-bombs” that are dropped during the movie.
BUNDLING
A pioneer custom of sleeping fully clothed in the same bed with members of the opposite sex. A tradition formerly in vogue in Wales and New England during a time when beds were scarce, men and women slept together in the same bed without removing their clothes. Halliwell’s Dictionary cites the Duke de la Rochefoucauld’s Travels in America: a practice wherein “a man and woman slept in the same bed, he with his small clothes, and she with her petticoats on; an expedient practiced in America on a scarcity of beds, where, on such an occasion, husbands and parents frequently permitted travelers to bundle with their wives and daughters. This custom is now abolished.” Could it be that the coo of lovers, “little bundle of love” came from bundling? Since you asked, bundling comes from the Middle Dutch bondel, from bond, and binden, to bind, binding, and German bundilin. The modern sense of bundling a baby or a package, “to wrap up in warm heavy clothes,” was recorded in 1893.
C
CAHOOTS
To collude with, to be in league with, to deal with secretly. So furtive is this word, no one really knows its origins. It hides in etymology dictionaries like a crow in a dark cave. Some scholars suspect it derives from the old Roman word cohorts, a troop of soldiers, and others say it comes from Old French cahute, hut, which provides a shadowy word picture of clandestine deals made in remote cabins in the woods. More recently, Daniel Cassidy suggests, in How the Irish Invented Slang, that its roots are in the Irish comh-udar, co-author, co-instigator. Thus, to be in cahoots with your collaborator on your next spy novel would be as redundant as sending a keg of Guinness to Ireland. Writing in the New York Times in 2000, columnist Molly Ivins asked, “Where’s the outrage? I’ve got plenty for ya!” When she interviewed the director of the Intermountain Tissue Center in Salt Lake City about the highly profitable trade in body parts, he told her, “If donors were told at the time about profits, they wouldn’t donate.” Ivins adds, “Duh. The nonprofit foundations involved in this grisly trade are in cahoots with the for-profit corporations.”
CALCULATE
To count; a method of reckoning. If you visualize the Roman fresco of a definition that the venerable Skeat provides, “to reckon by help of small pebbles,” you’ll never look at calculation the same way. For it comes from the Latin calculus, pebble, and calx, stone, specifically stones for the Roman (or Chinese) abacus to be used for accounting purposes. These stones also contributed to a clever Roman invention that only Mel Brooks could’ve staged. Mounted onto a chariot that carried passengers was a box full of pebbles with a small hole in the bottom. This box was attached to another box into which the pebbles dropped as the chariot rumbled along. When the chariot reached its destination, let’s say the Colosseum in Rome, the dropped pebbles were counted or calculated and the “fare” determined. Imagine the stones dropping like those numbers that click over on the old taxicab meters, and you’ll appreciate this Fred Flintstone-like device as the first taximeter. Who knew that math could be so much fun? Companion words include calculus, Newton’s invention of the branch of mathematics, and calculation, the act of figuring out stock prices, baseball averages, or the odds at a roulette table. “I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies,” Newton said, “but not the madness of people.” Calculus is also a medical term for a stone in the bladder. Curious companions include cancel, Old Latin for “fenced in,” represented by the # symbol, which is what we have to do with some of our calculations. And yet, not everything is calculable. Bertolt Brecht reminded us: “I want to go with the one I love. / I do not want to calculate the cost. / I do not want to think about whether it’s good. / I do not want to know whether he loves me. / I want to go with the one I love.”
CALM
Sheer tranquility amid the storms of life. This diminutive beauty comes down to us from the Provençal French chaume, to describe the time when flocks of sheep rested. Now that you’ve calmed down, think of how chaume evolved from the Latin caume, for the heat of the Mediterranean noonday sun, an utterly sensible time to rest, and the earlier Greek kauma, heat, and kaiein, to burn. Thus, we find compacted into a crisp, cool syllable the old folk wisdom that is wise to calm down when life heats up. If we don’t learn how to calm down, we will end up “burning down the days,” as novelist James Salter titled his memoirs. Companion words include the ironically stressful-sounding ataraxy, the psychiatric term for calm, according to the American Psychiatric Association. Stranger still, the APA resorts to defining calm not by what is, but what it isn’t: the “absence of anxiety or confusion,” adding that tranquilizers are called ataractic drugs, which makes me nervous just typing it. Fortunately, companion images abound: halcyon, as in the “halcyon days,” so named after the kingfisher bird that nested on seas, calming them at the period of the winter solstice. Later, halcyon coolly evolved into a popular synonym for idyllic, yo
uthful, soothing, evergreen calm. One of the most becalming lines of poetry I’ve ever encountered was by the 11th-century Arabic poet Abu al-Alaa’ al-Ma’arrii: “The world’s best moment is a calm hour passed in listening to a friend who can talk well.”
CAMERA
A curve in classical Greece, an arch in ancient Rome, a shadow-catcher instrument invented in 19th-century Paris, a dream-maker in Hollywood. Our sense of camera originates with chamber, in Old Latin; later it becomes a scientific term for any wooden box with a lens. As the box grew larger, with ever-stronger lenses, it came to be called camera obscura, a dark room, an innovation that aided such early painters as Vermeer and Caravaggio and later ones like Andy Warhol and David Hockney. By the early 19th century the box and the term shrank to become simply camera, the basic tool of a photographer, who can proudly and literally call herself a “light-writer.” Thus, a camera is a little room you hold in your hand by which you write with light. To keep going with the metaphor, here is an intriguing sidelight. When the first colonial cameras arrived in 19th-century South Africa they were advertised side by side with the first affordable rifles. The verb to shoot developed for both simultaneously. Little wonder that indigenous people around the world were suspicious of all those newfangled cameras aimed at them. “Shooting” was in the air, and the cameras caught it. In his autobiography, Ansel Adams gratefully remembered the summer of 1916: “One morning shortly after our arrival in Yosemite, my parents presented me with my first camera, a Kodak Box Brownie.” His sense of awe lasted a lifetime. In The Camera, he wrote, “Sometimes I do get to places just when God’s ready to have somebody click the shutter.” In the late 1980s, I enjoyed a few Proustian privileged moments watching Henri Cartier-Bresson wandering with his Leica around the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, looking, looking, looking through his camera before he ever snapped the shutter. Years later, when I read his humble admission, “Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst,” it made sense how he waited and watched, and watching, finally saw what he wanted to shoot. Bon courage to all those who follow the light. Lest we think artists are humorless, let us recall Larry the Cameraman’s words in Groundhog Day, “People think that all cameramen do is point the camera at things, but it’s a heck of a lot more complicated than that!”
Camera (Ansel Adams at Point Lobos)
CANADA
A country in North America; the land of my ancestors. According to Alberto Manguel, the name of his adopted homeland was granted when the first Spanish explorers landed in British Columbia and exclaimed: “!Acá nada! ” (Here’s nothing!”). In “A Case of You,” Saskatoon, Saskatchewan’s’ own Joni Mitchell described one of the most unusual tributes to a lover on record, so to speak, when she wrote about how she took a cardboard coaster and in the light of a blue television screen, “I drew a map of Canada / Oh Canada / With your face sketched on it twice.” From down under, in Australia, comes a story that’s almost too good to be true; it goes like this. In 1770, the intrepid Captain Cook was exploring the northeast coast, near a river he named the Endeavour, when a peculiar animal carrying her young in a pouch on her stomach came bounding by. Cook asked an Aborigine from the Guugu Yimidhirr tribe what it was. “Gangurru,” he was told, which the English sailors heard as kangaroo, and later entered folklore as “I don’t know.” Cook duly recorded it in the ship’s journal as “kangaroo.” And it’s said that when Spanish explorers arrived in southeastern Mexico they asked a leader from the Yucatec Maya people where in blazes they were, and were told: “Yucatán!” which actually meant “What do you want?” or “I don’t understand your words!” Whether or not these folk etymologies are literally true, they reveal the rare cracks of light and humor from the official reports of these colonial powers, as if to say, yes, there were misunderstandings.
CANOODLE
To caress, pet, fondle; lovemaking. A titillating verb, an amorous euphemism. Cuddling, with the promise of a little action; a humorous way to describe fooling around without sounding like one—a fool, that is. A word that snuggles up to you and asks to be embraced. The American Heritage Dictionary suggests that it could be related to the English dialectal canoodle, donkey, fool, and it’s not hard to imagine Eddie Murphy’s donkey in Shrek asking a girly donkey to canoodle in the back of the barn. But it is the suggestion of being a Fool for Love, as Sam Shepard wrote about in his tumultuous stage play, that gives the word the mule-kick of meaning. The AHD also hints at a connection with the colloquial German knudeln, to press or mold with your fingers, as with dough, which conjures up the possible origin of how a little canoodling could lead to sighing to your lover, “my little dumpling.” Here is a case of being so delighted with a new word that I went racing home—in Berkeley, circa 1981, on my 850 Yamaha—to check my dictionary. I had just seen The Lady Eve at the now sadly defunct University Theater and heard Ann Sheridan purr these lines about what she planned to do with her beau: “[I’m going to] finish what I started. I’m going to dine with him, dance with him, swim with him, laugh at his jokes, canoodle with him, and then one day about six weeks from now…” She didn’t have to say more. Companion words to use with your inamorata, your lover, include croodle, which Robert Hunter tenderly defines in his collection of words from Chester as “to snuggle, as a young animal snuggles against its mother.” And who can forget the amorous alliteration of Ian Dury and the Blockheads, in the mellifluously named “Honeysuckle Highway,” when they sing, “Cruising down carnality canal in my canoe can I canoodle?”
CANT
Any jargon used for secret purposes. The language or “slanted talk” of street gangs, criminals, mendicants, villains, beggars, prisoners, artistes, or rogues (also called “rogers”)—all those who feel the need for angled, skewed, coded language. According to Dr. Johnson, cant is probably from Latin cantus, implying the odd tone of voice used by vagrants; but some imagine it to be a corruption of quaint. “Clear your mind of cant,” he scolded Boswell, for he thought it “barbarous jargon,” and one of his ideals with the language was to purify it. The Oxford Dictionary of Word History defines cant as an allusion to “singing,” from cantare, the singing of choirs in the streets or beggars “singing” for alms. Skeats writes that it was “at first a beggar’s whine; hence, hypocrisy.” Cassidy makes a persuasive case that Irish was the “first literate vernacular in Europe,” providing English with thousands of words, among them cant, which he suggests hails from the Irish caint, “speech, talk, and conversation.” Thus, cant is evidence that there are always at least two levels of any given language, the official and the unofficial, the surface and the subterranean. Some cant survives, like the talk of gypsies; some is lost forever, such as the secret language of women in classical Greece. Companion words include cantankerous, a blend word of cant and rancorous, bitter talk. Recant then means something like “to take back your whining words.” Gibberish is another form of the secret language of rogues, imitative of chattering sounds, possibly a corruption of jabber, which in turn derives from French gaber, to cheat. Coming full circle, we find that cant is considered gibberish by the threshold guardians of language who often feel cheated—or left out—by the secret language of the street that is often far more alive and vibrant than their own.
CAPPUCCINO
Espresso coffee mixed or topped with steamed milk or cream. For me, the perfect cup of cappuccino resembles one of Morandi’s still-life paintings, trembling with earthen browns and whites. However, the word arose from the beverage’s inspired resemblance to the cappuccio, or long, pointed brown hoods worn by the Capuchin order of Italian friars. From the monk’s habit to the coffee habit didn’t take long; the word appeared in English in 1785. The first use of cappuccino in American English is recorded in 1948, after the rapid rise of cappuccino machines in America’s postwar fascination with European culture. Thus, a true cappuccino is a divine breakfast drink in Italy that begins with a strong shot of espresso followed by a dollop of velvety steamed milk, which insulates the drink, and often, like a monk’s hoo
d, which helps him focus by keeping away the outside world, it leads to contemplative thought. Either way, cappuccino is a habit that’s hard to break. In the comedy So I Married an Axe Murderer the mock beat poet Mike Myers holds up a manhole-cover-sized cappuccino at a North Beach, San Francisco café and snarls to the waitress, “Excuse me, but I think I ordered a LARGE cappuccino! ” Companion words include the capuchin monkey, so called for the tuft of black cowl-like hair, and feather, the slight verb favored by certain baristas to describe “the rising of cream on the surface of a cup of tea or coffee.”
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